Gagandeep's Blog
Posts on Engineering, Culture and Productivity
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1:1 conversations with 10 Software Engineers
This is a long blog post that captures some queries that people had in the 1:1 that I had with 10 engineers last month.
Stripe Interview Experience
I interviewed for the position of Staff Software Engineer at Stripe in December 2023. They were hiring engineers in the Verification & Identity Platform team.
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Improving your resume
Hello people. I've you're reading this, you might be looking to build a better resume. It's important to keep your resume updated even if you're not looking out for a change. Sadly, not many people like me realise this on time.
Bain and Co. Interview Experience
I interviewed for the position of Staff Engineer II at Bain and Company in Jan-Feb 2024. They were hiring engineers for the Gurgaon team (that's a small team of <15 engineers). They had posted the job on LinkedIn, that redirected to their website
Stripe Interview Experience
I interviewed for the position of Staff Software Engineer at Stripe in December 2023. They were hiring engineers in the Verification & Identity Platform team.
Atlassian Interview Experience
I interviewed for the position of Senior Software Engineer at Atlassian in November 2023. This was my first ever experience getting interviewed by a large product organisation. Just to brief about myself and my background ..
Titles, Inflation and Down-levelling
If you're confused about career ladders in different organisations, then this post will help you understand semantics of job titles (or job roles, or designations, or levels). There are many stories out there where people switch from a large service-based company...
Cloud, SaaS Cost Reduction
Reducing spend on SaaS tools is a continuous effort. At LocoNav, we keep a strict eye on such expenses and spend some time every now and then to make sure we're not paying extra for any service. In the past 1.5 years, we planned and executed a lot ...
Developing From Scratch: 2016 vs. now
One year into the industry, I wasn't sure if I knew enough about full-stack software development. I was working on a maintenance project, where we were mostly scaling down the system, doing small bug-fixes, doing a lot of ...
Devops Essentials for Developers
In my ~ 9 years of experience, my work has been a mix of Backend and Devops. Getting my hands dirty on Devops side has given me a lot of edge in understanding things related to deployment, cloud, servers and operating systems that other developers couldn't easily understand. For example......
Optimising docker builds
A detailed post on optimising docker build time and image size for any application based on my experience in optimising the same twice for one of our mid size application
Cloud pricing & Vendor lock-ins
Cloud pricing is complicated. If you are trying to optimize a cloud bill for the first time that mentions more than 10 managed services, it can take a decent time to understand how this is computed. Although most of....